The working group funded by the Yale Whitney Humanities Center investigates the relevance of the cultural foundations of law and public administration for both the understanding and making of law, and the understanding and restructuring of public administration. The premise that our laws and our institutions are culturally bound, and thus to a certain degree predetermined, calls for the implementation of a comparative cultural approach as a means to reassess current legal and administrative structures, and as a valuable aid in the assessment and making of law.